Page 7 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

"It doesnae matter now," he said finally, eyes still on the path. "What's done is done. Ye were kept safe. That's the whole of it."

Kept safe.

As if she'd been a coin tucked in a drawer, forgotten until someone remembered its worth.

She thought about Jenny’s kitchen. The particular smell of it on cold mornings. The way Jenny had taken her in at fifteen with nothing but a dead woman’s letter and never once made her feel like she owed anything for it. She had built a life in that house. A small one. A quiet one. But hers, built without him.

“I was nae nothin’,” she said. “Whatever ye told yerself to make this easier - kept safe, forgotten, whatever word helps ye sleep - I was nae nothin’.”

Something crossed his face, just for a moment. Then he hitched his horse forward, and there was nothing left to do but follow.

Chloe swiped a single tear from her cheek angrily, determined not to show how much it hurt that her own father had no feelings for her. She raised her head and continued riding behind him. They had barely cleared the courtyard when her father jumped off his horse and was at her side.

“Down,” he said. “We havenae got long”

She looked at him. “Long before what?”

“The ceremony is ready. I told ye, ye are to be married today.” The words were flat and forward-facing. “The kirk is just inside the east wall. Come.”

Chloe felt a cold hand squeeze her heart. She did not move. “Now? We’ve just arrived.”

“Aye.” He reached up and took hold of her horse’s bridle. “Now.”

She looked at the courtyard around her. Staff lined the walls, watching. Guards from her father’s entourage spread out behind her. The castle loomed on all sides, with gray stone and narrow windows, and aside from her father, not a single face she recognized.

She climbed down. She was shaking so badly that she stumbled and almost fell. A guard close to her reached out to steady her.

Her legs were stiff from the ride, and her back ached. Her hair was still road-dirty under the hood of her cloak. She had imagined, in whatever small way she had allowed herself to imagine anything this past week, that there would at least be a moment. A room to herself. Water to wash with. A breath.

With barely a glance in her direction, her father was already walking with a hurried gait.

Straining to keep her legs moving, she followed him across the courtyard, through a low archway, along a path beside the east wall. The kirk was small and stone-built, with a simple wooden cross above the door. Through the open door, she saw the candles burning inside, casting a warm, flickering light across the flagstone floor.

This is it. I am to be wed to a stranger. A cruel man, perhaps. Someone who would treat me as badly as me own father has.

She stopped walking. Her father turned. “Chloe.”

Then, from the shadowed doorway of the kirk, a voice she had never heard before cut through the cold air. Low. Unhurried. Certain of itself.

“Ye’re late.”

“The roads were poor,” she said.

Something shifted in his expression. Not warmth exactly. But something that had not been there a moment before.

“Aye,” he said. “They are.”

4

He did not move from the doorway.

Chloe stopped a few feet away, refusing to close the last of the distance herself. “Ye’re the one I am to marry, then.”

“Aye.” His eyes went the length of her, once, unhurried. “Ye were expectin’ someone else?”

“I was expectin’ a letter. A name, at least. Ye’ve had months.”

“I daenae write letters.”